Search This Blog

Appropriate punishments?

I keep hearing about people complaining about the punishment for this or that crime is too little or too much. I've got a simple (ish) idea for the calculation of appropriate punishment. This is what I would probably (naively) implement, had I known no better if I ever were to create or edit a country. Hear me out.

The decision for whether a crime is a crime is dependent on the relative loss to a person or entity. Generally, most crimes have loss and the amount of loss is to be decided between the lawmakers and those who have lost, taking into account what is gained proportionally to the ratio of that which has gained to what that which has gained already has.

Then, the appropriate punishment should be the addition of the reversal of the crime to the calculation of the amount of that which has been lost over the time over which it has been lost, to the extent that the entity which has lost is happy that the debt has been repaid.

For instance, for petty crimes like vandalism, it would depend on the type. So if we imagine a bridge with a mural has been vandalised with a large logo, the entity which has vandalised would have to reimburse the original creator of the mural with not only the exact fixes which were required (e.g. cleaning or
repainting to the exact original specification so that an expert would not notice the difference), but also work on another mural with the same artist for as long as it would take to make up the value lost of the original (e.g. speed it up for as long as the vandalism was viewable, or perhaps take into account the amount of extra business that the creators had lost and add this on, until the original artist was happy). All of this would be decided between the entity that had been lost and the lawmakers.

A bigger example might be thievery. If a thief had taken a jewel, they would have to at no cost to anybody return it (which would mean buying it back at the original price if it had been sold) plus reimburse the place it had been taken from with the amount of lost business or people had it made a difference to the business from where it had been taken, or if it was taken from a home, not only return it in its original condition (one would have to clean it or something) but also perhaps to pay for a psychiatrist for the mental trauma it had caused and add the extra quantified amount of happiness to the person to make up for the time where happiness was lost (from thievery to the solved state upon finishing the course of psychiatry). Of course, if the happiness was never solved, the fine for the thief would potentially be unlimited.

For murder it's perhaps more silly, but the most reasonable thing I can think of is that the murderer would both have to spend the amount of time required researching and bringing the person back to life in their original state and invest in the amount of happiness required to make the mental state of their loved ones the same as it was before, as if it had never happened. They would also have to perform acts to the world which the victim was capable of, such as finishing their work in their exact manner. This could be difficult and troublesome but that's just the cost of murder now. This reminds me of the unaging quote from Kim-Yeung O'Flaherty: "You killed my accountant! Now you must be my accountant!" (I couldn't find an original source, but here's an impression).

Perhaps if the victim knew no one and the world was "not at a loss" for the loss of the victim, then all it would require is the restoration of the life of the victim and no more. This still is a ridiculous feat, but that's just how I see it, and it's what people would have to be tasked with for murdering. No less than a life of painstaking research of something that may not be doable.

In summary, I don't believe in "an eye for an eye", but I believe instead in "an eye for a replacement eye. functionally the same, and appropriate reparations for when this eye was not functional in an agreed way, as if there was never an eye missing".

So, criminals need to undo crimes to the extent that it's as if they never happened at all. No more, no less. No dying as punishment for killing. People's situations are all different! No spending time learning how to be a more criminal criminal with other criminals as punishment for being a criminal, and then not being able to get a job because the criminal was previously a criminal, which leads the criminal to do more criminal things, no. Just pure undoishness is my philosophy.

Did I make any sense? Could anything have been better clarified, and could I improve upon this idea? Please let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I haven't made a blog in a long while, so I'd thought I'd share this, which I recently discovered how to do.

If you find the idea of proxies a bit restrictive. because after all, they have to be set up in the applications in question, and may not work for some applications, help is here. And all you need is an SSH server you can connect to. Sadly, this method requires root, but it's worth having for the system-wide Internet connection you'll get from it.

Authenticating as root
First, make sure you're root on the client machine (sudo -s or su -, depending on your distro), and that you can ssh as root to your target server. This is of course causes security implications, so it may be a good idea to generate a key pair for root-to-root access and block off passworded access for root, so that no one can bruteforce your root password.

Did you know that Android devices expose a modem on the USB interface, even when "Tethering" is turned off? It appears like this in dmesg:

[22338.529851] cdc_acm 1-3:1.1: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

You can connect to this as a raw serial console like: screen /dev/ttyACM0 or: minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0

This will accept GSM modem commands prefixed with AT, and give information about the phone, and presumably allow a dialup-like interface.
Many of the examples on M2MSupport.net will work with the phone, depending on which manufacturer and capability set, presumably. With my Samsung Galaxy XCover 4, I got the GSM capability set.
Try playing around with this, but don't get charged by your provider too much for making calls you never end! Make sure you hang up properly as per the protocol.
For more on standard modem commands, see the Hayes command set article on Wikipedia.
That's all for now!